"Welcome to BBC News, America's most trusted news source".
A low quality hodgepodge of words, masquerading as an article promoting the BBC's Panorama's Are you Scared Yet, Human?
A few low quality choice of quotes:
Speaking to BBC's Panorama, Brad Smith said it will be "difficult to catch up” with the rapidly advancing technology.
Eric Schmidt, former Google chief executive who is now chair of the US National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, has warned that beating China in AI is imperative.
Seth Moulton, chair of the US Future of Defence Task Force is urging tech companies to support the Department of Defence. "Because we're in a race, because we are in this competition, that’s really what it comes down to,” he said. “Are you going to help us win this race or are you going to essentially be against us?"
Are we sure this Ministry of Truth style doublespeak isn't already here?
> Eric Schmidt, former Google chief executive who is now chair of the US National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, has warned that beating China in AI is imperative.
Ah yes, Eric "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" Schmidt. I'm sure he has my best interests at heart when he advocates for an AI arms race with China.
Yes, Schmidt will have a personal interest in beating "China in AI", it's just that I personally have a personal interest in both working to impose their AI on me. So, killing the messenger (here BBC) doesn't do much to clean CCP face.
The EU average is about the same as Canada at 13.7% of GDP. The UK is up at 19.2%. If anything, I would think that Canada's 2020 deficit is pretty typical of developed countries.
A currency’s value is the trust that you will be able to exchange it in the future for something you want.
An army can help that by signaling the stability of the country. An army alone does not do the job though, the real value lies in the trust and organization of the society itself. The more of that there is, the more others will believe the currency will be able to buy something they want, since organized societies with high trust are able to produce desirable things.
A secondary concern an army helps with is enforcing laws and preventing fraud, such as counterfeiting. If you know the US is not going to let some other tribe or country counterfeit their country, and has the capability to stop them, it helps you trust the currency more.
Obviously, the armed forces aren’t directly involved in the first few layers of conflict, but it’s always advantageous to have the ability to park an aircraft carrier fleet off someone’s coast during negotiations.
The largest producer (Saudi Arabia and other OPEC members) of crude will only accept USD for payment. In exchange the US guarantees security. You may read the inverse of the security guarantee as well. Producers defying the arrangement may expect regime change or other hostilities.
>However, by 1971, convertibility into gold was no longer viable as America's gold resources drained away. Instead, the dollar became a pure fiat currency (decoupled from any physical store of value), until the Petrodollar Agreement was concluded by President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1973.
The essence of the deal was that the U.S. would agree to military sales and defence of Saudi Arabia in return for all oil trade being denominated in U.S. Dollars. A secondary option to this agreement is the purchase of U.S. debt securities with surplus oil proceeds. By 1975, all OPEC nations agreed to price their oil supplies exclusively in U.S. Dollars and to hold their oil proceeds in U.S. government debt securities.
The graph is for the growth of debt to GDP - we previously had lower debt and so the need to react to COVID caused the debt to grow by quite a bit as CERB was implemented to try and keep people liquid. I can't find any break downs of 2020 in terms of actual debt to GDP, but the chart supplied definitely isn't telling the whole story.
"The octopus is oppressing America, and it is destroying America. In the New York Times the country seems literally on the brink of anarchy and war, all in service, to the power of the New York Times. Look what is happening! When times are good and people are happy and fulfilled and successful the New York Times is an irrelevant bore. When the world is ending as they would have you believe (it is not) they become more powerful than the president. They are the ones that choose the president. You may think that if you vote for Trump or Biden that it will get better. It will not! It will only get worse! The only way to get better is to stop reading the New York Times. And stop writing for any of its tentacles."
This resonates with me especially. In a time of excess we are led too often to believe we are on the brink of collapse. Manufactured crises.
Relevant readings talking about the NYT and journalism:
With Citadel as a large market maker I would think Robinhood likely has a financial conflict of interest with them with respect to their customers, selling Citadel "dumb flow" (and now, depending on how you look at it, lobotomizing the flow).
At least one Wall Street firm has taken heavy losses — Melvin Capital Management, which was shorting GameStop, among other bets. It’s been bailed out by Citadel, which, confusingly, is not the same thing as Citadel Securities. (Citadel is a hedge fund, not a market maker.)
Keeping people safe from themselves. Stocks where Retail investors are blocked from buying by TD Ameritrade, Robinhood, etc. yet hedge funds and others are free to continue...
Just yesterday Discord bans the WallStreetBets community.
Note: I held a few positions in some of these volatile stocks
Discord has had significant investment from FirstMark Capital, Greenoaks Capital Partners, Index Ventures, IVP, Greylock Partners, Benchmark, Accel, General Catalyst, Ridge Ventures, Spark Capital, and Tencent Holdings. How much you want to bet they also involve with the hedge funds?
I can tell you with some confidence that no partner at any of those funds could care less what some public market long/short outfit thinks and vice versa. Both of these groups of people invest money and that's about where the similarity ends.
"We're suffering from success and our Discord was the first casualty. You know as well as I do that if you gather 250k people in one spot someone is going to say something that makes you look bad. That room was golden and the people that run it are awesome. We blocked all bad words with a bot, which should be enough, but apparently if someone can say a bad word with weird unicode icelandic characters and someone can screenshot it you don't get to hang out with your friends anymore. Discord did us dirty and I am not impressed with them destroying our community"
Key point for me. Under the guise of 'hate speech' suppression is occurring. Of course every platform has the right to dictate users of their platform yada yada...
I think the long history of events like these, particularly the more recent publicised ones, are going to push lots of communities, and by extension the Internet, to decentralisation.
That's good and bad because communities can't be shut down when they shouldn't, and can't be shut down when they should.
That's a bold statement, you think it's so obvious? Do you think not being able to shut down child pornographic trading communities is a lesser evil than shutting down WSB discord?
This tired justification of "child pornography", "terrorism" and "hate speech" has been beat to death to ban just about everything these days.
Why not ban cars ? After all both paedos and terrorists use them to carry out their evil, nefarious deeds. They both also use toothpaste.
I think is perfectly fine being un-able to shutdown sites for "social justice". If it ever escalates to being a major criminal problem, a legal case can be filed and it can go through the courts before the ban-hammer falls.
> a legal case can be filed and it can go through the courts before the ban-hammer falls
Once a community that cannot be shut down is declared illegal, what happens? One of the major points of decentralized communities is that there is no effective "ban hammer" to shut them down.
Then it is declared illegal and simply continues to exist. If this is truly a major crime (loss of life, major financial loss), then governments have many means outside of technology to shut stuff down: old-fashioned detective work, cross-national police work, enforcement of treaty obligations or even para-military action in severe cases.
Right now, a sneeze can ban you on the cloud. And the bans are just a click away - and in many cases not even that.
CP trading chat rooms should be shut down by arresting people creating and selling content in there, not by giving someone the right to shut down any chat room they want by the click of a button. Because if you can shut down CP trading chat rooms by the click of a button, we all know this button will be used mainly to target good causes as CP represents a tiny proportion of people or even criminal activities.
Child pornography is illegal, IMO rightly so, and people trading in it should be arrested.
I will never cease to be amused by people who invoke CP to defend censorship when a discussion about control of online discourse is ongoing. We are talking about companies shutting down a group organizing against wall street hedge funds on the pretext that they're Nazi white supremacists, we aren't talking about pedos physically abusing children for profit. If you expect that this is a gotcha and that I have no choice but to declare that I think CP should be protected or else I have to support banning WSB from discord you really need to refine your conversational skills.
I get they're probably scared as hell, but they don't even take care of the child porn or child grooming Discords.
It's not even slightly paranoid to say that somebody gave financial incentive to make this happen, but for them to censor with absolute bullshit reasoning behind it... This is just not good.
Are you saying Discord openly permits groups that share child porn? Or discusss how to find it? I could understand the latter if the discord itself has nothing illegal but that’s still pretty shocking.
I know for a fact that it happens. Certainly they would stop it if they knew about it, but they don’t police this stuff like you might think. They rely on their users to self-report for the most part. [1]
“ On April 23, 2020 at 1:55 p.m., the Marysville Police received a tip that child pornography had been uploaded while using a discord online service.”
There are groups like this all over the place. I know who this person is.
“A discord online service” is Discord.
Also kind of interesting in writing here you can see some local papers are just way out of touch with the tech community.
Don't services that accept large amounts of user-generated content scan for illegal stuff against a database of known material? I find it odd that Discord wouldn't do that.
It's been said that some Discord investors are also investors with Steve Cohen's Point72. The fund targeted by WSB, Melvin Capital, managed $1bn for Points72
Beyond them possibly being directly or indirectly involved on the (currently) losing end of GameStop stock, they may be worried about SEC paying attention to them. I personally think they're in the clear here, but maybe they aren't so sure.
The buses were public and segregation was a law. Blacks made up 75% of the bus customers [0]. A competing, nonsegregated, service would have owned the market if it were possible. So it probably wasn't.
The situation here is very different. There is no government monopoly favouring Reddit or Discord.
That’s a weird analogy that doesn’t make any sense. It’s actually quite offensive to compare the segregation of a whole people to what’s basically a sign on Discords door that said “We don’t allow this type of speech. We have bouncers here.”
Also Rosa Parks wasn’t anonymous, and I assume many on WSB are. I wonder if they would act the same if they weren’t? Or in real life?
It was more a comment on the general "Oh, big tech banned you?" well just create your own payment network, dns service, cdn, hosting, etc etc.
And to extend your analogy, it's like a whole nightclub being permanently closed because one of the 250,000 people in the club (admittedly a big club) said a bad word. It's just a new form of Tone Policing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_policing)
It’s like a nightclub being closed by the nightclub’s owner, which I think most would agree the nightclub’s owner has the right to do by virtue of being the owner. It’s not closed by police or any outside entity.
> You know as well as I do that if you gather 250k people in one spot someone is going to say something that makes you look bad.
The problem with this statement is the shifting use of "you". I might know that a mob acts like a mob, but I'm certainly not going to be surprised if "my" rights are affected if I'm part of the group from which the mob manifested. That doesn't mean the decision to alter my rights is directed at me, personally.
Random speculation about why this was done or who did it, for what reasons, is also a type of mob thinking.
This is because it was reintroduced by returning Australians due to the rest of the worlds inability to contain it. Now we'll hopefully have some minor restrictions until we get on top of things again because you can effectively contact trace at these levels of transmission.
This doesn't prove that lockdowns don't work anymore than a car crash death proves that seat belts don't work.
Notion has had some great marketing, and has some useful features, but I don't think its as great as the hype around it suggests. YAWT, Yet Another Writing Tool. To be forgotten? in a few years.
When I used it, it seemed like a Jack of All/Master of None type of tool. Seemed like it was focused more on those who enjoy and find value in the act of taking notes rather the value of the note itself. I'm probably not the intended user, but for a lot of daily uses (Meeting notes, TODO lists, etc.) I found a barebones GDocs/Word/Pen and Paper to be more efficient and less taxing to pick up.
The John Hopkins powers that be have yet to publish what "inaccuracies" there were that required the take down. I suspect that they got "the call" from someone that is connected to their line of funding.
